Five-year plan

Yeah, yeah, I used to have one of those. Climb the career ladder, move to a bigger dwelling, volunteer more …

A five-year plan sounds alarmingly like New Year’s resolution,s and I’ve been making the same ones for way more than five years: lose the weight, pay off the credit card bill, beef up the savings, don’t gossip, don’t yell at the kids, see only the good in my husband … There, that’s this year’s list.

But a bigger plan … hmmm, my five-year plan focuses mostly on my kids, who, at 18 and 16, don’t really feel that I should be making plans for their lives. Well, with Christopher in college, my five-year plan for him includes figuring out how to make the transition from conversations about clean laundry, grades, whether he’s eaten a vegetable in the past six months and when his holiday break starts, to something more like a conversation I’d have with a friend.

For Cormac, the five-year plan includes all the details of getting into college that accompany these last two years of high school. And, to not fight with him.

He, interestingly, is the child who is encouraging me to follow a dream I’ve had for a long time. In one of the pitched battles that only a mother and a teenager could have, he accused me of accomplishing nothing in my life. The novel I’d always wanted to write remained completely unwritten, he told me, whereas he has completed five movie scripts.

Every mother reading this knows why he is taking real steps toward his dream, while mine lingers in my head: while he bangs away at the keyboard, I (c’mon, we can all say it together) cook, clean, grocery shop, do laundry, pay bills, walk the dog …

But way too soon, the children who have been the focus of my life will be out of the house. With college tuitions, we’ll be so broke there will be nothing to do but finally write that novel.

Here’s betting the main character will be a woman who realizes that the best years of her life were the ones when her children were growing up!